Alan Ryan Intellectual Courage

THIS IS AN ARTLESS PAPER, WITH MORE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL CONTENT

than is proper. The autobiographical content may be excused by this consideration: teaching political philosophy for 40 years in a great variety of institutions, I have been puzzled and amused by the ways in which diflFerent writers and their work have attracted or repelled their readers. In particular, there is often a sharp disconnect between the narrowly intellectual and the more broadly human^what one might call the psychological or temperamentalappeal of different writers. This is not, of course, to suggest that either the intellectual or the human appeal has been predictable, as though every student can be relied upon to find Augustine emotionally engrossing but intellectually rebarbativeindeed, I find him the reverse. Does any of this matter? In the following manner, perhaps. In an aside during a conference a few years ago, Wendy Brown aptly characterized political theory as the intellectual practice of teachers who are besotted vdth 24 booksgive or take another two dozen. Ignoring the old question whether the 24 books represent a canon, and whether the very idea of a canon is wicked, or the creation of a canon one of the bastions of civilization, we can here wrestle with a smaller question about the kind of engagement vnth the work and its author that sustains teacher and student. If you do not hold, as I do not, that the purpose of the political theory curriculum is the inculcation of eternal moral truths, the unmasking of assorted forms of race, class, or gender tyranny, or any one thing whatever, you will probably fall back on the thought that the teacher's task is to facilitate a fruitful encounter between the new reader and the immortal dead, while taking a fairly relaxed view about what the firuitful-

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ness is to consist in. But that, of course, brings us back to the question of the nonintellectual charms of the writers with whom we spend a lifetime. Puzzling over these phenomena, I have wondered which aspects of this "human" attraction exerted by political thinkers matter most. To me, I think, it is a certain boldness, a readiness to cut across commonsense, tradition, and authority; it may go along v^dth a willingness to be proved wrong, but in the work of two of the boldest, least commonsensical, and most strikingly anti-traditionalist writers of all, it certainly did not. Plato was one of them, and Hobbes the other. Hobbes may, as a country clergyman complained, have affronted a whole host of the learned, but Hobbes cared nothing for that. John Aubrey reported that Hobbes remarked that if he had read as much as other men he might have knovm as little as they. But Hobbes surely did not think that he might be vwong; as he said, the only thing not demonstrated in Leviathan was that monarchy is the best of all forms of government; all else he thought was proved beyond doubt. This is not, even on the "human" dimension, the sort of thing that appeals to all readers; and even the reader who shares my taste for intellectual risk takers will respond to many other aspects of a writer's temperament, just as I do. But, one thing at a time. What does intellectual courage consist in? What fosters it, and what subverts it? Is it always a virtue?
THERE ARE MANY STANDARD OBSERVATIONS THAT WE MAY MAKE ABOUT

courage in general, and they seem to apply directly to intellectual courage. This is not, however, because someone who thinks bravely is simply a courageous person, thinking. Consider Hobbes once more; he prided himself on his timidity. "I was the first of them that fied," he said of his part in the English Civil War, and when he set out the duties of the sovereign authority over several chapters of Leviathan, he took care to insist that men who were naturally timorous should not be made to do military duty but could be excused on condition that they paid for substitutes. He was, if we take him at his own estimation, a coward who had seen further and more clearly into the nature of law, the state, authority, and obligation than anyone hitherto; indeed, he thought

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himself the Euclid of political science. Hume, again, was neither someone who prided himself on his cowardice nor a man who was convinced that he had created a new science of politics; but he was as bold a philosopher as he was cautious a political commentator. Pas trap de zele was the motto in politics, sharply distinguished from the realm of speculation where anything went. Courage, then, is commonly explicated in terms derived from Aristotle: the virtue that occupies a mean between cowardice and recklessness; the foolhardy man fails to appreciate the danger of what he faces or the riskiness of his actions, while the coward appreciates the dangers all too well, and is unmanned by them. Aristotle's own discussion in the Nicomachean Ethics strikes the naive modem reader^who is someone like myself, neither an ancient historian nor a fiuent reader of classical Greekas a mixture of the straightforward and the alien. The straightforward is exemplified by the statement that originates the standard view: "The coward, the rash man, and the brave man, then, are concerned with the same objects but are differently disposed towards them; for the first two exceed and fall short, while the third holds the middle, which is the right, position; and rash men are precipitate, and wish for dangers beforehand but draw back when they are in them, while brave men are keen in the moment of action, but quiet beforehand" (Nicomachean Ethics, III, 7). The more alien aspect of Aristotle's discussion is his insistence on the role of noble motives in courage; as usual, it is elusive, moving back and forth between the thought that nobility of character will keep a man at his post when mercenary motives will not, and the thought that bravery consists in facing up to what a man with a noble character is right to fear. Behind this lurks the familiar, class-biased vision of a world in which the better sort of person displays the virtues proper to himself Was Aristotle himself a courageous thinker? Compared with Plato, the answer can only be that he was not. This is not a matter of Plato putting his doctrines in the mouth of Socrates, who was the epitome of intellectual and personal courage, but of the doctrines themselves. Take Plato's attempt to demonstrate that doing justice is always

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better for the doer than doing injustice, and the allied doctrine that it is always better to suffer injustice than to do it. These claims are not just false, but glaringly and obviously false. Doing justice is not always better for the doer than the doing of injustice, and the Republic does nothing to shake that proposition. Yet Plato recruits Socrates to defend the claims I have just described as glaringly and obviously false, time and again. Now, one could imagine a sensible Plato retreating to any number of wholly persuasive views, such as the thought that rational utility-maximizers who were allowed to choose their characters behind a veil of ignorance would choose to have characters that made them behave justly even when it was not in their interests, because they would know that on average persons with such characters would do better than persons who engaged in picking and choosing their moral options. That viewone that Hobbes may have held, and a view that Robert Frank has certainly argued for very elegantly^would close most of the gap between looking after oneself and behaving justly; what it would not do, could not do, and would not suggest that any view might do, is show that behaving justly is always better for us than behaving unjustly. Hobbes, as is well known, would have thought us mad to suffer death rather than commit an injustice, and any modem account is bound to say that even if we are so constituted that we cannot bring ourselves to commit an injustice to save our own lives, it is absurd to say that we do better by dying. Plato, of course, says just that, and will not move off that ground. This raises an issue we shall have to recur to in passing; since Aristotle's commonplace account of courage as a mean is commonplace because it is so obviously right in so many cases, it should be possible to distinguish between intellectual courage and mere rashness. What is the intellectual danger that a rational person fears but does not succumb to, and what is the danger that the reckless person makes light of, fails to acknowledge, or charges straight at? The obvious answer is that it is the danger of error; but risking making a mistake is a condition of saying an3^hing at all. It is running the risk of a disgraceful error that seems to fit the bill. What, then, is a disgraceful mistake? One suggestion is

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that a disgraceful mistake is one that stems from the sort of incapacity to think straight that one would associate wdth a child; that is, that just as conduct appropriate to a slave cannot be virtuous, so the intellectual errors of a child are disgraceful in the adult. Whatever one thinks of Plato's arguments in the Republic, and in spite of Thrasymachus's claim that Socrates needs a nursemaid, no one supposes that Plato was thinking childish thoughts. A second suggestion might be that a mistake is disgracefiil if it ignores plain and obvious facts, rests on logical howlers, and as it were slights everything we know about the way to get at the truth about the world. It would be very hard to argue that Plato ignored plain and obvious facts. Indeed, the scandal of Plato's posture, and probably the respect in which he was most true to Socrates' actual intellectual style, was that he took the plain and obvious facts so thoroughly on board and drew from them such strikingly counterintuitive implications. He it was who raised the bidding whenever one of his interlocutorsGlaucon particularlytried to give him an easy way out by, for example, suggesting that society was made possible by our agreeing to restrain our naturally self-seeking inclinations in return for a similar restraint by others. This first coherent version of a social contract theory is simply ignored as Plato goes ahead with the project of showing that just as justice in the large must be good for the city that possesses it, so must justice in the individual be good for the individual who possesses it. Now, one might say that the analogies on which Plato relies to show that justice in the large illuminates justice in the individual are scandalously bad, and by the same token sneer at his analysis of courage as one of the three virtuescourage, temperance, and wisdom that make up justice in cities and individuals when they are properly ordered. That, however, is not much to the point. The point is that Plato's boldness is just that^boldness, courage, intellectual bravery, and not mere folly. Whatever else he has done, he has not exposed his argument to shameful overthrow, as witness the way in which students two and a half millennia later first gasp with surprise, then suffer terrible frustration in trying to explain just what is vwong v^th Plato's case.

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If that is one form of intellectual couragereljdng on one's own arguments, not flinching at their counterintuitive quality, ready to count the world well lost for truthit is easy to see why Aristotle secures a much more grudging respect fi:om many of his readers. It may be good advice to seek in practical matters only as much certainty as the subject matter allows, but the view that this means that we can always shelter behind the well-known locution, "all men agree that..." is not something to endorse without hesitation. It is not plausible to think that Aristotle was in any ordinary and obvious sense cowardly. He led what most of us would think of as a fairly adventurous life, and spent some years closer than was wholly safe to Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great; indeed, he died, if not in exile, at least well away from Athens on the island of Euboea, a figure of suspicion to the embattled Athenians hecause of his Macedonian origins and allegiances. Nonetheless, intellectual courage is not the quality most readily associated with Aristotle. He had innumerable other intellectual virtues: ingenuity, meticulousness, the mastery of a vast range of material, good sense, and what was once called "bottom," to name but a few. Some of his insights into political stability came as novelties when they were rediscovered in the mid-twentieth century, notably his claim that a "lozenge-shaped" distribution of income and wealth promoted stahility hecause those vdth much to lose outnumhered both the oppressively rich and the would-he insurrectionary poor. Its buried history is a lesson in Aristotle's real virtues, for one might object that it is a thought that practical politicians have without any assistance fi:om impractical politicians rediscovered whenever they compared peaceful societies with chaotically class-confiicted societies; hut that complaint is neither here nor there. Aristotle was concerned precisely to extract fi:om the unrefiective practice of plain men and practical political operators as much well-organized theoretical v^asdom as there is to be had. It might well be objected that the distance between the practical man's perceptions and Aristotle's insights is too short to entitle Aristotle to claim that he has done any theoretical sophisticating of the data at all, but this would

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be unfair; what the plain man had noticedperhapsand had used as a rule of thumb, was embedded by Aristotle in a novel, and contestable, account of the way in which felt injustices roused us to revolt in ways that mere hardship did not.
THE POINT ABOUT INTELLECTUAL COURAGE IN THE SENSE EMPLOYED

here is that it presupposes an idea for which classical WTiters do not seem to have had an expression, though many of them demonstrated an attachment to it. This is the notion of self-reliance. Aristotle was, one might say, systematically opposed to self-reliance. Not only was he quick to say "all men agree" when it was at least disputable whether they in fact did, but his insistence in his scientific writings on saving the appearances was just what had to be rejected two millennia later when Galileo rejected the appearances in the name of an irresistible theory. To say "self-reliance" is to risk anachronism and worse, but one concession that needs to be made immediately is to agree that it is easier to rely on oneself if one has a firm conviction that one's self is itself supported by something on which it can rely. Socrates evidently thought his daemon knew what was best for him, and faced all manner of threats and eventual execution without flinching. Galileo flinched, but plainly thought that reason was on his side, and that whatever he might say for the sake of saving his own skin, the universe was on his side. Quite what fuelled Hobbes's conviction that he could, intellectually, make war on the whole host of learned men and come to no harm is somewhat mysterious. Although he may well not have been the atheist that he was accused of being, his materialism left little room for any deity beyond an arbitrary and incomprehensible force that might have chosen to create any universe or none. The intellectual universe of his most read work is wholly humanity-centered. The logical construction of Leviathan depends only on an understanding of human beings as selfmoving automata with the power of self-reflection and a deep commitment to self-preservation along with a vulnerability to death and injury that gives that commitment plenty of work to do; it is the interaction of creatures so imagined that will, in the absence of a sovereign authority.

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result in a "warre of all against all," and, given effective government, can result in a world of friendship, prosperity, and intellectual progress. One of Hobbes's bolder strokes was to leave God out of the equation so that politics became neither a remedy for Original Sin nor the refiection in human affairs of God's absolute empire over his whole creation. Hobbes may have observed that when we speak "more reverently" of the sovereign we can see him as "the mortall God to whom under the immortall God we owe our salvation," but to be mortal was exactly not to be God. Hobbes's anxious automata work out by the light of their own reason that they would be a great deal better off if they all obeyed the set of rules that writers had commonly described as the laws of nature; but Hobbes insisted that it was improper to call them laws, since they were but "theorems" concerning what conduced to the safety of mankind. To turn them into laws, someone had to enact them, and Hobbes was entirely willing that people should see them as enacted by God; nonetheless, what really counted was that rational people could see that we need to have some device that will regulate our conduct, and that these "theorems" embody the rules that such a device will impose, and that they therefore provide the terms of social and political peace. In a curious way, Hobbes was deeply attached to the God who stalks through the Book of Job. The engraving that forms the frontispiece of Leviathan is surmounted by a tag from the Book ofJob"Non est potestas super tenam quae comparetur eius"^that is, "There is no earthly power like his." The Book ofJob is all about the way in which pride gets its comeuppance; Leviathan is "king over all the children of pride" (Job, 41, 34) and that, of course, is what Hobbes's earthly sovereign must be. All of which poses an interesting puzzle. That pride is the great threat to Hobbes's picture of a tranquil society and an orderly, lavi^l polity is not the puzzle, for the reason is obvious enough; an effective government can secure prosperity so that men will not fight for mere survival; and it can secure the peace, so men do not fight out of a fear that if they do not strike first they will be struck by others. What it cannot accommodate but simply has to crush is pride or vainglory; this is the

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desire to occupy the topmost position simply because it is the topmost position; it is what foments a search for domination for domination's sake. That urge for supremacy cannot be accommodated, but must be stamped out. It goes wdthout saying that Hobbes was fearful of some aspects of aristocratic pride; he thought men who provoked others into fighting duels that they would surely lose were both cruel and a social menace, and he thought aristocrats who believed that they were entitled to political power because of their family pedigree and social standing were intellectually in error and politically a menace. There were many other aspects of the aristocratic code that he admired, such as generosity and a capacity for friendship, and a taste for intellectual and artistic achievement. He was, after all, a pensioner of the Cavendish family. Still, it was not only the aristocracy that he thought puffed up with an unwarranted opinion of its own merit. He was even more hostile to the deluded convictions of prophets and politicians who thought that they were called by God to bring enlightenment to their fellows and to reveal His truth to their fallen fellow citizens. God had ceased to speak to mortal men when he ceased to speak through the prophets of the Old Testamentsupposing that Hobbes really thought God had spoken through the prophets even then. Hobbes's view that a man who says that God spake to him in a dream says no more than that he dreamed that God spake to him is not much support for a claim to a divine mission. But that shows the oddity of Hobbes's position. Or, for my purposes, it shows the difficulty of distinguishing simple intellectual courage from what one might call intellectual pride or vainglory. Does not Hobbes topple over from the one into the other? After all, given his conviction that he has demonstrated all the central truths of political science, and that the model of a political science is geometry, what can he say to his critics except that they have failed to follow the argument or have failed to see the inescapability of his definitions? A different view of what politics is about would find room for discussion and dissent; that is, ifprudence, the approach that Hobbes thinks better than

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nothing but a great deal less valuable than science, was the only way to understand politics, the give and take of argument about just what had happened in the past and just how to extrapolate from past to future would be the obvious way to improve our political skills. On that view, one could readily see that intellectual pride was what Hobbes said it was: the vice of those who paraded their historical learning for the sake of their own vanity rather than for the sake of discovering useful lessons from the past. Within Hobbes's ov^m universe, however, things become more complicated. Hobbes understood the issue almost exactly as I have posed it; he was insistent that we should not take our own reason as any more likely to reveal the truth than that of anyone else. To do so was like a man taking for trumps the suit whereof he had most in his hand. The difficulty is, however, that the distinction between prudence and science is precisely that science cannot lead to error, so that the notion of asking others for assistance in closing in on the truth becomes more difficult to work with. Or, to be more exact, it can be made sense of, but it requires a form of the sociology of inquiry that Hobbes was quite innocent of and may well have disliked if he had ever had to encounter it. So, we can work our way toward a conclusion by t3dng together an account of intellectual progress and the role in progress of an intellectual culture that sustains or perhaps enforces a certain kind of institutionalized intellectual courage. To slot Hobbes into the story and to illustrate it further with two writers to whom I have devoted much of my working life, it may be sensible to start at the end rather than the beginning. The end, of course, is the philosophy of science of Karl Popper and its criticism by Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, and my nineteenth-century models are Marx and Mill.
WE HAVE SEVERAL TIMES RAISED AND EVADED THE Q.UESTION OF HOW

the intellectually courageous thinker is to respond to criticism. Now we must provide an answer. Taking Plato and Hobbes as paradigmatically courageous^bold at least and in some eyes, foolhardythinkers has

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allowed me to ftidge the question for too long. Popper was famous for taking Plato as one of his targets in The Open Society and Its Enemies, in the first volume of which he accused Plato of almost every crime that an enemy of the open society could commit, starting with intellectual authoritarianism and ending with a historicist and totalitarian racism. Still, it is worth noticing first of all that Plato set out his interpretation of Socrates' ideas in the form of dialogues, the early ones genuinely open-ended arguments in which Socrates hy no means always gets the better of his interlocutors, and in which more often than not there are several losers in the sense of arguments leading to agreed dead ends, but very few vdnners. Only late in the day does Plato produce "dialogues" that are in essence didactic monologues. Does this mean that Plato was willing to believe that he was v^Tong in the way that I previously denied? I think, with some hesitation, that the answer is not exactly. That is, Plato thought, as did Hohhes, that once one had seized hold of the truth, that was that. What the younger Platoat least if we assume that "Socrates" is his mouthpiece^was ready to agree was that he had not yet seized hold of the truth. To the extent that the concept of intellectual progress is at home in the work of Plato, which the doctrine of anamnesis suggests cannot be very far ("progress" consisting of "unforgetting"), it is progress toward a fixed and ideally knowable truth. Until it has been seized, it is elusive, and to use the recurring metaphor of the dialogues, it has to be hunted from covert to covert. There is much to be said about this process, from the hunting metaphor onward, hut it is important to seize hold of the point that it is something close to the dramatic enactment of a series of proofs by reductio ad ahsurdum, save that what is commonly reduced to absurdity is not, as it is in logic exercises, the contradictory of a self-evident truth where the point is to show that the self-evident truth is indeed such. What is reduced to absurdity in the dialogues is almost every commonplace of ethics, politics, and epistemology that a decently educated Athenian might be expected to believe. The status of the truth that the philosopher eventually comes to is not in this case much like the status

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of the truths demonstrated in everyday argument by reducUo. In the end, the philosopher's truth seems to be validated by a kind of intuition proper to such truths and no others. So, it seems plausible to argue that the cooperative process of hunting truth all over the landscape of Attica supposes a boldness in the hunt, and a courage in the exposition of some strikingly unbelievable claims, but is not quite a precursor of the Popperian process of conjecture and refutation, and not a process that should lead us to define philosophical truth in processual terms asto use a thought of Peirce's^what we are fated to agree on at the end of the day. By the same token, Hobbes's inner dialogue is better understood on the model of solving a problem in Euclidean geometry than on the model of a Habermasian ideal conversation in an ideal speech-situation. Since courage is a virtue of individuals, I have been writing as though that was the beginning and end of the matter, but of course it is not. As Machiavelli observed in the context of the success of the Roman army, it was not that the average Roman in the street was brave by nature and needed only to be kitted out in fighting gear, but that the Roman army took the raw material embodied in young men on their farms and molded it in an army whose members would die where they stood rather than turn their backs on an enemy. The question then arises of what the analogue is for intellectual courage, if any analogue exists. This is where Karl Popper's lifelongor, to be cautious about exactly when he hit on the idea of "falsification" very long-lasting attachment to the methodology of bold conjectures and stringent testing comes in. There are many conditions of a broadly cultural kind that have to be in place before we can follow Kant's injunction of sapere audedare to understand; I want to end with a short coda on some of them. But Popper's account of scientific method in fact requires the institutionalization of an intellectual culture of courage in something of the way that an army involves the institutionalization of military courage. The thought goes like this: there is nothing intrinsically unscientific or meaningless about all sorts of propositions that logical positiv-

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ists used to condemn as meaningless; "God loves us" is not meaningless, nor is the proposition that the moon rotates about the earth because it is propelled by invisible, weightless donkeys. Both are ill adapted to feature in a scientific account of the world because neither comes with any clear picture of what it would take to decisively falsify it. What science is about on this view is putting up hypotheses about the way world works that are susceptible of refutation by empirical evidence; progress is achieved when false hypotheses are demolished to be replaced by hypotheses that are more robust in standing up to attempted refutation. There is much to be said, and much that has been said, about the route by which more credible hypotheses are evolvedafter all, it cannot be progress merely to refiite a hypothesis and leave the landscape barren, and in practice the process of refutation is not wholly negative but rather a process of tailoring and refining our guesses about the world in the light of evidence both positive and negative. Still, the crucial point remains intact, that this is an account of intellectual progress. It is not, however, a process of convergence on a fixed point whose general character is understood in advance; it is in Popper's work hardly defined at all. It bears, in fact, a striking resemblance to the principle of "grovfth," by which Dewey intended us to assess educational progress, moral progress, and social progress; neither Dewey nor Popper thought there was an external standard by which to assess growth but neither doubted that the development of the sciences was directional; a halfway competent scientist could tell which theories had been developed after which others. There might be periods during which dead ends were explored, and parts of disciplines might explore what turned out to a whole series of dead ends, but the point remained intact. The sciences did not lose ground they had gained and did not circle back to theories they had rejected already. The criteria of growth were internal to the disciplines themselves, but were nonetheless publicly available and discussable. Indeed, Popper thought it a bad feature of science as institutionally practiced that it had become so hard to explain its findings to an intelligent layman.

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The device by which progress is kept up is essentially the institutionalization of the culture of conjecture and refutation. And what this means is that the ideal scientific culture inculcates intellectual courage in the sense of inculcating the readiness to expose our ideas to skeptical and critical audiences; and one nice aspect of this understanding of the way in which an intellectual culture is created is that it picks up another aspect of the Machiavellian emphasis on the way a none too admirable human nature can be turned to inspiring ends: only when it becomes "easier" to be brave than cowardly vwU courage become a characteristic that permeates, in the one case the Roman army and the hoped-for Florentine militia, and in the other case the scientific community. To forestall the obvious complaint against this enthusiastic endorse ment of the Popperian ideal of intellectual courage, I should say that it is, of course, an ideal and as such suffersfi-omtwo deficiencies. In the first place, it may hold up an ideal that nobody has lived up to, and in the second place, it may so over-illuminate one aspect of what serious scientific practice is like that it casts equally important aspects into deep shadow. One might, in that light, read Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutionsdescribed by Popper himself as a threat to civilizationeither as saying that practicing scientists have never lived their professional lives "on the edge" in quite the way Popper suggests that we might, or as saying that the whole scientific community is committed to hazarding its collective beliefs in the face of whatever nature reveals, but that for this to happen, most individual scientists get on with routine gap-filling work. If one asks why gap-filling is an acceptable way of life, the answer is then that contributing to a collective, communal exercise in understanding the intricacies of the natural world is a deeply attractive way to spend one's life. Patience, self-discipline, scrupulous attention to detail, and a decent respect for the opinions of one's colleagues are ideals just as powerfiil in their way as courage, boldness, and the search for intellectual excitement. In essence, then, my claim is that what intellectual courage is does not much change across time, but our understanding of its point and the cultural supports that assist it have changed, and vwU no doubt continue

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to change. I want to end with two final thoughts. First, I want to nod in a direction that it would be interesting to explore properly, but not here. This is the elimination of what is commonly known as the "cultural cringe." Australian intellectual and artistic life has often been enlivened by arguments over the extent to which Australians cringe in face of the metropolitan culture exemplified by British thinkers and artists. From a British perspective, it often seems that Australian anxiety about this results in a splendidly cantankerous and anti-British literary and academic life, but the thought we may borrow here returns us to Emerson rather than Robert Hughes. Emerson's lecture on the American Scholar was, whatever else it may have been, a call for an end to cultural cringing. Finally, a small paradox. I have devoted a considerable part of my life to elucidating the ideas of several liberal heroesMill, Russell, and Deweyalong with the ideas of two writers vth whom I have never quite managed to come to gripsHegel and Marx. The paradox, if it is one, is this. The Mill of the liberal tradition is not, by the lights of this essay, a particular bold thinker; the Mill of the early, less liberal essays that Gertrude Himmelfarb so much admired, was a rather bold, if not entirely original thinker, and even Marx grudgingly conceded that the
Mill who wrote Essays on Some Unsettled Qu.estions in Political Economy in

his mid-twenties was an imaginative and innovative economic theorist. But what Mill was defending in his essay On Liberty was exactly intellectual and spiritual boldness, and the paradox is that he did it with considerable intellectual caution. This is not to say that the arguments of On Liberty are anything but ingenious: on the face of it, trying to square a belief in the inviolable right tofireedomof thought and action with the collectivist impulses of utilitarianism is an impossibility, but Mill's multiple assaults on the problem are nothing if not determined andto my eyesuccessful in showing that all rights save the absolutely fiindamental right of self-determination can be given a utilitarian explanation and defense. Nonetheless, On Liberty is a very defensive work; Victorian England is oppressive, not in the sense of being politically oppressive but in the sense that the climate of opinion was de-oxygenated. This

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was Mill's conception of what the t5nranny of the majority meant: not Madison's fear that the lower classes would expropriate the property of the better-off, but a more Tocquevillian or perhaps even a more Nietzschean sense that middle-class respectability placed a wet blanket over original thought. The question, of course, is how one might rebel against that respectability. My view is that there was a very narrow line between the final madness of Nietzsche and the desperate attempt of Mill to tell his contemporaries that they were choking one another to (intellectual and spiritual) death politely enough to avoid being simply dismissed as absurd. And Mill on this view rose to the level of irritation but not to the degree of intellectual courage that would have allowed him to break free of the assumptions that he inherited from his father and shared with all too many of his contemporaries. This is not to be taken as a great criticism. After all, Marx, who did on my view sustain the requisite degree of intellectual courage^whenever a topic became utterly intractable, he simply ploughed straight ahead, inventing concepts such as that of surplus value, which solved one problem and created a host of others by which he was equally undeterrednonetheless created a great deal more heat than light. One might be grateful for the sheer energy and unabashedness of Marx, but not for the coherence, explicitness, and lucidity of what he left for his followers. But as I said at the beginning of this short essay, intellectual courage is a virtue, and a virtue that assists the reader to sustain her or his engagement with a vmter; but it is by no means the only intellectual virtue, and perhaps ought to be ranked lower than such pedestrian qualities as clarity. Defending that thought, however, would require us to start on another essay entirely.

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